A wireless fidelity (WiFi) technology has been widely applied in various industries. The most basic network structure of the WiFi technology is an access point (AP) plus several stations (STA). The AP provides an access service for the STA. A radio signal is used as an interaction medium between the AP and the STA. The radio signal refers to a physical frame, and generally appears in a form of a physical layer convergence procedure (PLCP) protocol packet, including a packet header and a data part, where the data part is a Media Access Control (MAC) frame. Generally the MAC frame appears in the PLCP packet in a form of a MAC protocol data component or a MAC protocol data unit (MPDU).
In an existing standard, the MAC frame includes a MAC frame header, a body part, and a frame check sequence (FCS) part, where the body part is the data part. The MAC frame header generally includes a 2-byte frame control (FC) domain, a 2-byte Duration (length)/identifier (ID) subdomain, a multi-byte address subdomain, a 2-byte sequence control subdomain, a 2-byte quality of service (QoS) control subdomain, and a high throughput control subdomain. Therefore, the length of the MAC frame header generally reaches 24 bytes.
However, in an 802.11ah application scenario, for example, on a sensor network, an STA communicates with an AP very frequently, transmitted data amount is both small, possibly smaller than the MAC frame header, and a data transmission rate is very low on the sensor network. Therefore, when the MAC frame in the existing standard is used, the transmission efficiency is low, and an application requirement cannot be satisfied.